ANCESTRAL EATING: Some Speculations on the Origin of Dairying

Did the ancestors of modern Europeans start dairying because they just couldn't resist the taste of milk?

Why did the people of the great Eurasian steppe start domesticating animals like horses, cows and sheep and milking them at the beginning of the Bronze Age?

Could it be because milk tastes great and makes you feel so good when you drink it?

Yes, actually. Maybe it could.

A couple of months ago I wrote here about the invention of dairying as one of the great turning points in history. The invention of dairying unleashed the Indo-Europeans on the world, catapulting them from a small niche on the Eurasian steppe to a continental “empire” stretching from Scandinavia in the west to the Altai mountains in the east. These people would go on to become the modern European peoples—and the rest, as they say, is history.

For that reason, to my mind, the invention of dairying deserves to be ranked as the equal of the Agricultural Revolution, the invention of fixed-field farming in the Near East, c.10-12,000 years ago.

Most people don’t know anything about the ancient Indo-Europeans or the role that dairying played in pushing them centre-stage in world history, but with new genomic and proteomic studies, that might be about to change. Then again, this is a story that’s considered politically dangerous, so maybe not.

Anyway. The question remains: what made the ancient peoples of the Eurasian steppe decide to adopt this radically different diet and way of life?

The truth is, we can’t really know. We only have direct evidence that it happened, and we can say when it happened, roughly.

We can speculate about the causes though. We could talk about the superior nutrition provided by milk—the protein, the fat, the vitamins and minerals—and we could talk about how dairying provided a moveable store of this incredibly nutritious food. Milk can also be preserved in various forms like yoghurt, kumiss and, of course, cheese. How any of this would have been clear to the first dairyers before they actually started doing it, though, is unclear.

Another thing we could talk about is exorphins.

Exorphins are compounds that mimic compounds called endorphins produced in the body. You may know endorphins as the compounds responsible for the “runner’s high” you feel after going out for a run. These compounds are responsible for giving us a sense of reward, and foods that contain exorphins give us a sense of reward when we eat them.